Newest Pollution Concern: ‘Ugly’ Sperm

The fifty shades of gray hovering above China’s cities could be sapping the country’s men of their virility.

That’s the message from one Chinese newspaper website citing findings from a sperm bank in Shanghai that monitored samples over a decade and found two-thirds were “affected” to various degrees by environmental factors.

Potentially a source of couples’ bedroom disputes, the report is one of two this week feeding a frenzy of speculation on the Chinese Internet about how the country’s notorious pollution impacts reproductive health. Sperm can grow to be “ugly” and “not able to swim,” the head of the sperm bank, Li Zheng, told the Shanghai Morning Post (in Chinese), a newspaper owned by the military-run Liberation Daily.

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Reuters

Smoke rises from chimneys and facilities of steel plants on a hazy day in Benxi, Liaoning province November 3, 2013.

The discussion first erupted on Tuesday after a little known publication called the China Business Review ran a headline bound to get attention in a country more obsessed than most with children: “Smog Can Impact Humans’ Reproductive Ability and Immune System.” Below, the newspaper showed a rendering of how dust particles harm different organs in the human body.

Both articles cite a new “green paper” on climate change issued by the China Meteorological Administration and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. As one might expect, the report is mostly concerned with minimizing the carbon footprint of China’s urbanizing population, though it does making a passing mention, on page 248, of the negative effects on human health of air pollution. Particulate matter can “influence reproductive abilities,” it says.

While neither the green paper nor the initial China Business Review story offered any data to support their claims, that hardly seemed to matter to the country’s microbloggers, who have long expected the worse from the air they breathe.

A study in July found that air pollution from coal combustion likely cut life expectancy in parts of China by more than five years during the 1990s. This week, China’s official news agency Xinhua reported a doctor saying that an eight-year old girl from the eastern province of Jiangsu had contracted lung cancer from prolonged exposure to harmful particles having lived near a dusty street.

The Wall Street Journal called Beijing’s United Family Healthcare for its take on what doctors should be telling their patients, but the hospital declined comment. “Our (obstetrician and gynecologist) chief refused the interview, because there is no data or document to explain the pollution’s impact to pregnant women,” wrote spokesperson Yafei Zhu.

Previous studies have shown exposure to high levels of pollution can reduce the success rate of in vitro fertilization and drawn a link between toxic air and reduced fertility in men. In September, local media reported that scientists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Nanjing Medical University and Zhejiang University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences would conduct a national research study in 2014 to examine how toxins in the environment, including pollution, impact women trying to give birth.

Mr. Li from the Shanghai sperm bank says it has been facing a lack of qualified sperm donors and quality sperm in the last decade, and that only one-third of its sperm meets World Health Organization standards, according to Wednesday’s report in the Shanghai Morning post. A spokesperson at Ruijin Hospital, which houses the sperm bank, said Mr. Li was not available for comment.

Readers of the China Business Review article were far from reticent. The post elicited 441 comments, including one that sardonically proffered a silver lining: “Yes! No need to use condoms anymore.”

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